8

HENRY HAD ALMOST FORGOTTEN HOW DELICIOUS IT WAS TO BE behind a wheel. The van handled well despite its size; the steering was tight and the highway was as smooth as a woman’s leg. He sped down the stretch between the plaza and the turnoff to Irondequoit, and when he caught the light at Titus he cornered with a small but satisfying squeal and then slowed when he heard his uncle gasp. Through the broad curving lands of his old neighborhood, past the culs-de-sac and the handsome houses and the islands planted with magnolias and bulbs, he drove smoothly, rhythmically, enjoying both the feel of the van and the sight of all he’d created in what had once been a melon field. Kitty used to tell him that he loved this first development of his the way another man would love a first child, and he knew, looking at the smooth green lawns, that she was right.

His sense of well-being vanished when he saw Lise’s car parked next to Kitty’s in front of his old house. Lise, his oldest daughter, wasn’t speaking to him and wouldn’t answer his calls. More than her younger sister, Delia, she seemed to be unable to forgive him. She might have accepted his failure and financial ruin—she had made it through college, she had a job, she was safer than the rest of them. But when Kitty, on the night she’d cursed Henry and thrown him out, had called both Lise and Delia and told them it wasn’t just the way Henry had trashed their futures, nor the way he’d gambled everything on his foolish project and lost, but the lying, the cheating, the girlfriends—Anita, most of all—the girls had turned their backs on him.

Anita, Henry said to himself, and he nearly groaned aloud as he parked the van and lowered his uncle to the ground. Useless for him to try to explain that Anita had also abandoned him. Lise and Delia had turned away from him, sped to their mother’s side and embraced her cause completely. Kitty, who wore the role of wronged wife as if she’d been born to it, hadn’t spoken to Henry in more than a month. He had hoped to find the house empty today.

He wheeled Brendan up the flagstone walk he’d laid so carefully when the girls were young. “Does she know we’re coming?” Brendan asked.

“No,” Henry said. His heart skipped several beats. The pachysandra around the beech looked ratty and dry and the lawn was riddled with grubs. The screens still leaned against the garage where he’d left them. One wheel of Brendan’s chair caught the corner of a stone thrown up by frost, and the fact that Kitty hadn’t had the stone replaced annoyed Henry enormously. His house was falling apart already, and by the time the bank auctioned it off it was bound to look hollow, haunted, unloved. Whoever bought it would have only contempt for the man who had let this happen.

Brendan said, “Why don’t I wait out here?”

“Come in with me,” Henry pleaded. “You haven’t seen Kitty in ages.” He rang his own doorbell and then stood behind the wheelchair, hoping his uncle’s presence might neutralize Kitty’s venom.

His dog, Bongo, yelped and yowled inside the house. His daughter opened the door, stared at him, and then said, “Grunkie,” after a moment’s poisonous silence.

Lise had cut her hair, and within its smooth brown frame Henry saw his own face reflected. She had his bumpy nose, which looked craggy in his face but was too strong and large in hers. She had his jaw, a bit too square, and his pale blue, almost lashless eyes. It pained him that she wasn’t more attractive, and he wished that Anita, or someone like her, would take her aside and teach her how to dress and wear makeup. She was almost aggressively homely, and in her refusal to decorate herself, in her blunt manners and sensible clothes, Henry saw his own stubbornness. Delia, dainty and feminine, so much resembled Kitty that he felt he’d had no part in making her. But Lise was his, so much like him that he both rejoiced and despaired.

Lise stared steadily at him and then slipped her eyes to Brendan’s neck brace. “What a surprise,” she said.

“Lise,” Henry said. “It’s good to see you.” His voice sounded false even to him and he winced as she helped Brendan over the threshold and into the house without another glance at him. Bongo hurled himself at Henry’s knees, sixty pounds of spotted mutt with a floppy pink tongue, and Henry scratched Bongo’s ears as Lise and Brendan chatted. Then Lise called, “Grunkie’s here!” as if Henry didn’t exist. Henry’s heart shrank and withered and burned.

“Lise,” he said again, but she looked at him scornfully and moved away. When she was a tiny, bony child, she had sometimes looked at him in just that fashion. She went to her room and hid in the back of her closet whenever he punished her, and when he went up later to coax her out, her eyes glittered so coldly that he found himself apologizing and forgetting her misdeeds. She stood at the shelves near the staircase now, slamming books into boxes. The floor was littered with them, he saw—boxes of books, of pictures, of crystal and china and clothes. He had thought Kitty still had a few weeks before she had to move.

Kitty came out of the kitchen, wrapping a goblet in white paper and saying, “Brendan! What in the world … ?” in the low, rich radio voice she’d developed when she went to work at the PBS station. Henry could remember when her voice had sounded like anyone else’s. One afternoon, during the summer that he’d turned twenty and had been working with a construction crew, he’d looked down from the roof of a cottage on Canandaigua Lake and seen on the beach below him a young woman with two little girls in tow. The girls were blond; the woman, hardly more than a girl herself, was black haired, creamy skinned, delicately boned. She looked like Henry’s mother, whom Henry could hardly remember. She spread out a blanket, settled the girls and the dolls they’d brought with them, and arranged a meticulous picnic: sandwiches cut neatly in half, grapes and peaches wrapped in a napkin, homemade cookies in a lidded box, and miniature versions of everything for the dolls. A baby-sitter, he’d decided, watching as she solemnly poured liquid into the dolls’ cups. Working for one of the wealthy summer families. The charmed circle she and the girls had formed on the sand looked like everything he’d missed in his own life. He had climbed down from the roof and dropped his hammer and told his foreman he was taking a break. Drawn by an envy so strong that it was already almost love, he had introduced himself to Kitty and her charges.

“Is that your house?” she’d asked, and he would have given anything to have been able to say yes. The sweet, bland surface of her life enchanted him. She had two parents, two brothers, a dog and a cat; as he courted her, with a frenzy that excluded both his sister and his ailing grandparents, he saw a chance that he could escape his ragged childhood and make a stable family for himself. His dreams had worked out just the way he’d wanted. He’d married her and moved into the city and left Coreopsis behind; they’d raised two daughters and had picnics on beaches and vacations in the mountains. All along, until that wretched radio station had captured her, he’d thought she shared his contentment.

And then one year, when the girls were half-grown and he was working day and night building the fortune he’d thought they both wanted, she’d signed up for some night courses and made friends with a group of women he disliked. She’d started volunteering at the radio station when Lise entered high school, and then somehow, when his back was turned, she’d become a stranger with a tangle of black hair and too much eye makeup and this voice—this husky, rippling voice—that rained over the city five times a week.

There’d been times, in the last few years, when he’d been driving along the back roads searching for land and had heard her voice purring from the radio. Then he’d imagined that he didn’t know her at all and that he could go home and fall into bed with this frightening, exciting stranger. He’d imagined creeping up the stairs and coming upon her damp from her shower, her hair glistening with steam and her voice caressing him. But she kissed him absently when he approached her and then put a load of laundry in the drier or a chicken in the oven. She set her glasses on her nose and said she had papers to read, or she complained about his friends or his hours or his bills. When he made love to her, she looked out the window or twined her fingers in the fur of Bongo, who came and stood by them and sniffed and whined. She had pushed him away—on purpose? By accident? He’d never been sure—and then used the women to whom he’d gone for comfort as an excuse to push him out.

Her face soured when she caught sight of him. “Oh,” she said. “You.”

“Kitty,” he said. She looked dry, self-possessed, incapable of yielding. And yet he could remember a time, before the voice, when she’d lain down with him in the fields of Coreopsis.

“Are you here for a reason?” she said.

He stood behind Brendan’s chair and waved his hands over Brendan’s head, meaning, Don’t humiliate me. Don’t do this in front of my uncle; feeling, behind his hope, the weight of all the hard words she’d heaped on him the past six months.

“We’re busy,” she said, disappointing but not surprising him. “We have things to do. I’m moving, in case you’ve forgotten.”

Brendan cut smoothly and gently into her angry speech: “Where to?” he asked. He might have been talking, Henry thought, to one of the strangers at his stoplight.

“Where to?” Kitty said mockingly. “Lise was able to find me an apartment in her complex. Two stories, a little patio with a bit of grass all my own. I’m sure I’ll be very comfortable.”

“Twin Oaks?” Henry said. “You’re moving there?”

“You have a better idea?”

“Let’s go in the kitchen,” Henry said. “Please? We need to talk.”

He strode off, hoping Kitty would follow. Behind him Brendan said, “Henry? You know we ought to get going,” and then, as Henry turned the corner, “We can go in a minute, I guess. I’ll just sit here and talk to Lise …”

Kitty followed Henry. “What are you doing here?” she said. “I asked you not to come … and what in the world are you doing with Brendan?”

Her voice was so biting that he realized he couldn’t safely tell her the truth about anything. She twisted his words; she twisted his every move. She hates me, he thought with surprise. He couldn’t remember anyone ever hating him before.

“I’m bringing him over to Wiloma’s,” he lied. “She and the kids wanted to see him. Then we’re all going out to dinner. The Home loaned us the van.” He hoped Kitty wouldn’t remember that he wasn’t supposed to be driving. She glared at him, waiting for something more. “I thought I’d just swing by here, since I was out,” he said lamely. “I need to pick up a couple of things, some extra blankets, some clothes I forgot …”

Kitty wrapped glasses silently. She had always been able to wait him out, wait until his nervous voice filled the silence and he hung himself. He forced himself to change the subject: “How are the girls?”

“Like you care.”

“You know I do—you know this is killing me. You think I like seeing you forced out of our house?”

“Your house,” Kitty said bitterly. “Your house, your development, your stupid, stupid projects—when was any of it ever ours? When did you ever think about what the girls and I might want?”

This was so manifestly unjust that Henry stared at her. He had always, always, done everything for her and the girls—all his work, all his buildings and projects and plans and dreams. “That’s not fair,” he said. “If Coreopsis Heights hadn’t failed—I was trying to make something for all of us, make enough money so that you and the girls would be really secure, so you could do whatever you wanted.” He had said this before, he thought. Or something like this—he had told his sister, years ago, that he couldn’t stay in Coreopsis while Da was sick because he had to go make enough money to save them all.

“And Anita?” Kitty said. “What was that?”

“A mistake. I made some mistakes. Can’t a man make a mistake now and then?”

“I heard you’re working at a box factory. Another mistake?”

“It’s just temporary. It’s what the employment agency had. It’s just until I get back on my feet and we get all of this straightened out.”

“Don’t kid yourself,” Kitty said, whacking silverware into a box. “We—we aren’t straightening anything out. We aren’t a we anymore. I’m moving Wednesday, and once I get out of this place and the lawyers finish up, we aren’t going to see each other again. Not if I can help it.”

Henry backed away from her, wondering when she’d gotten so mean. “I’ll just go get what I need,” he said.

“You do that.” Kitty tore open another cabinet and began stacking dishes furiously. Henry tried to imagine her in one of the apartments at Twin Oaks: shoddy construction, low ceilings, flimsy stairs and walls. The closets were shallow and all the windows jammed. He knew the man who had built that complex: Dominic, who had skimped on every phase of the construction. Kitty’s belongings—our belongings, he thought with a pang of loss—would be hopelessly out of place.

In the living room Lise was listening absently to Brendan. “I’m fine,” Brendan told her. “Fine, never been better.” Lise glared at Henry as he passed her and fled up the stairs. More boxes, more disarray. His shirt felt heavy on his shoulders and he started to sweat. Without thinking, hardly seeing, he pawed through the closet he had once shared with Kitty. Blankets—fine, he thought. Two. A short-sleeved shirt and his long-billed Red Wings cap. Sneakers—I thought I had those. I thought they were at the apartment. The briefcase Da had given him when he’d left Coreopsis, with the sheaf of yellowed newspaper clippings and papers inside; the framed picture of his parents at the Farewell Ball, where, his mother swore, he had been conceived—don’t look at that; a stack of ties the girls had given him, which he had never worn but always saved. He crammed these things into an empty box he found lying near the bed. He hadn’t taken much when Kitty had thrown him out—it hadn’t seemed necessary, he’d thought he had plenty of time. But now he was seized by the fear that Kitty might get rid of everything.

When he came downstairs, Brendan said, “Things you need?” Kitty came into the living room and said, “Good. Get that junk out of here.”

“We ought to go,” Henry said to his uncle, who nodded. Lise wheeled Brendan out the door and then stood by him near the van, saying something that Henry couldn’t hear from the living room. He touched Kitty’s elbow, the elbow of this woman who had once been his wife.

“I’ll call you Monday,” he said. “We need to talk.”

“Don’t bother. We don’t.”

Henry cleared his throat. “Listen. I know this is a little strange—but do you have any cash you could spare?” He had to ask, although it tore at his stomach; he and Brendan had fifty bucks between them. “I get paid next week, I’ll pay you right back ….”

Kitty laughed at him. She called Lise to her and eased Henry out the door; as he passed Lise, she looked over his shoulder as if he were nothing to her. He thought of the time he’d lost her at Midtown Plaza, when she’d been three or four and small enough to blend into the forest of knees and thighs. He still didn’t know how it had happened. He had taken his eyes from her for just a minute, just long enough to examine the posters filling the travel agent’s window with palm trees and blue water and stretches of white sand, and when he looked back for her she was gone. The plaza was packed that week before Christmas, a sea of dark coats and scarves and jumbled legs and lines of children waiting to sit in Santa’s lap and ride the mechanical reindeer. Lise hadn’t made her way to the other children or the tree hung with gifts or the tired men costumed as elves. She wasn’t at the candy counter or the ice cream stand. He had climbed up on the concrete planter ringing one of the potted trees and looked down on the crowd, but still he hadn’t been able to see her. For the next half hour he’d run around in a fog of panic and guilt.

She turned up in the arms of a security guard at the information desk, and when she caught sight of him she burst into angry tears. “You left!” she shrieked. And while he knew he hadn’t, that he had stood unmoving in front of the window while she trotted away, her accusation had stung him. He’d forgotten her for a minute and it came to the same thing.

Kitty closed the door behind Lise, shutting out Henry and Brendan and also Bongo, who had slipped out behind Brendan’s wheelchair and was chasing a squirrel around the yard. Henry walked slowly toward the van, carrying his box of useless objects. When he opened the van door, Bongo leapt inside before Henry could finish raising Brendan’s chair. Henry looked at his dog, flop-legged and pink-tongued and uncomplaining and eager, and he said, “Fine. You want to come, you come.”

“Henry,” Brendan said from his perch behind the driver’s seat. “This maybe isn’t a great idea.”

Henry closed his door and started the engine. “He’s my dog,” he said, and the three of them drove off.